This just makes me feel like the entire modern process of matching workers to employers is a kafkaesque hell that has negative value.
The boss doesn’t even care that the guy obviously violates the intention of his companies process. Stay in jail long enough and you’ll pass one of our arbitrary steps!
What's the intent of the process?
I remember hiring a few years ago, where a deep background check uncovered an assault charge on a candidate I liked. The charges had been dropped. But they were violent in nature, and this spooked my team.
Fortunately, our GC once did family law. Between me pointing out this was a remote position and our GC showing that the facts of the case looked incredibly like domestic dispute in the midst of divorce, we wound up hiring her. And she was great!
We can also be concerned about the incentives for prison labor - for profit prisons and all the many service providers that get paid a mint. Phone calls in many prisons are like $10. Labor gangs and the such. It’s just horrible how badly we treat people in the US for some middleman to make money.
Criminals have to want to stop doing crime before they can be rehabilitated.
Whenever a read a story about someone who's been to prison and then ends up a solid, productive member of society, I can't help but think: "This person must have extraordinary grit and determination!" Because when a criminal gets out of prison, the entire system and the entire society is set up to try to oppose his rehabilitation and get him back into prison. Overcoming this active hostility must take a remarkable person.
This is precisely the story of Les Misérables - that remarkable person being Jean Valjean.
This is literally what rehabiliation entails. Convincing criminals that they have better options than crime.
It doesn't work for everyone. There are absolutely bad people who will just violate social contracts, or who can't control their rage turning into violence. Those people need to be incapacitated. But for the vast majority of criminals, particularly non-violent criminals, crime is an economic cost-benefit exercise.
I think some people just haven't been exposed to the benefits of taking a path to life that doesn't involve crime. Some people also need to be convinced that there are viable alternatives to crime. And as someone else said, society needs to give them the chance to redeem themselves and pursue those alternate paths.
Ensuring they can communicate with their families at no charge would be a huge plus as well.
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3A42e604d8-31d0-4067-a08c-...
Agree, but do we have experiments trying Nordic models in America to see what aspects of their model work here (and which may not)?
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-will-little-scan...
Sounds like Oregon started but hasn't gotten very far:
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/08/425946/how-norway-helping-...
Getting policy right under adversarial conditions is really hard - even harder than the already hard problem of identifying and testing good policy.
There's lots of evidence that maintaining connection to family, and providing skills training reduces recidivism. You should be asking for studies proving that what we're currently doing is effective or humane.
As in, a certain % of the population is, very unfortunately and not of their own volition, born with innate antisocial traits. They just happened to roll an 1 at birth and are stuck with it for life. Assuming humans are not a blank slate, many said humans will not be re-trainable to be pro-social. And they will cause mayhem and misery to those around them unless isolated, humanely and with compassion, from the rest of society. Given a large enough of a denominator, that’s potentially millions of people.
And fair point around social ties being important here, I wonder what percentage of imprisonment that would prevent.
Here in Brazil criminals are extremely dehumanized as well and used as electoral fodder. Leave them to rot in amounts proportional to the anger of the population against criminality as it rises again in the country, or at least the perception of it.
They are used to quickly let this social pressure out without actually solving anything and without making the population safer.
It would be really nice if remote work could serve as a viable vector for rehabilitation. Everyone involved would benefit from it, we just have to beware of the wrong kinds of incentives, so that people don't get thrown in jail only to serve as cheap remote labor later.
I only bring this up because it seems like the mental model most people have is that 50--90% of prisons are private - mainly because it gets discussed so much. But the problems with prisons by-and-large involve government administration, not for-profit companies running the amok (despite that also happening in a much smaller number of cases).
~ https://abcnews.go.com/US/top-private-prison-companies-profi...
Prison Contracts: Profits & Politics
Two corporations, GEO Group, Inc. and CoreCivic, Inc. (CCA), manage over half of the private prison contracts in the US.
These contracts are extremely lucrative; in the 2017 fiscal year, GEO Group and CoreCivic earned a combined revenue of more than 4 billion dollars.
Corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic are invested in mass incarceration because incarceration is profitable for them.
Such corporations ensure that correctional facilities are in demand through a variety of techniques, including minimum occupancy clauses and political lobbying efforts.
https://legaljournal.princeton.edu/the-economic-impact-of-pr...
This is a starry-eyed, naive perspective. Truth is, criminals disproportionately are vile people, largely past any hope.
Places with a greater population tend to get more representatives in a state or federal legislature, all else being equal.
This makes sense for minors (part of voter-households) and noncitizen adults (either another part of voter-households or with freedom of travel) but it becomes a perverse-incentive when we start talking about people forced to be in a specific place by a government that put them there and won't let them leave.
The only ethically-hard problem is which jurisdiction their vote should count in, since they cannot demonstrate it by choosing where to live. Perhaps a choice between:
1. The location of the prison, if their main interest is the conditions of their detention rather than anything outside.
2. The location of their property or close family, because they're still paying property-taxes or school levies etc. and they will be returning there later.
Many people live in area, but keep their voting registration in another. They are even able to vote without having to return to their registered polling place. Allowing inmates to vote could just as easily be handled the same way.
Gives new meaning to working in Mountain View.
Awesome. So so so awesome
This stuff truly is a disturbing view of the future of the US.
>earn above a certain amount, 10% goes to the Department of Corrections for room and board
Yep. There it is. Sounds nice now right? Until in 5 years they decide, well it really needs to be 20%. Then it 5 more years. Well they are in prison so 30% should be resonable. Then as tax deficits grow .....weeeellllll maybe 70%..... Then it will be well prisoners shouldn't really be getting rich in prison so we take 100% but when they get out they will still have that job to fall back on. Just wait and see.
To be clear I'm not against giving people a chance to reform. This is not that. If a person is reformed enough or behaved enough at a chance for reform then they should be on probation at worst. Not propping up a industrial prison complex for nonviolent crimes like 20+ year sentence selling drugs.
Simpler explanation: "slavery" never ended, it's just called something else now
Especially with all the race issues in imprisonment.
So they take a cut of your pay. Totally not profit? They deserve it? Why not 20% why not 95%.
Also this headline is yellow AF. "Prisoners are thriving" oh yeah? "THRIVING" In f-ing prison? I bet if you asked them 100% would rather not be doing their full time job in prison. I'd stake my life on it in fact.
They also have to volunteer, what are you even saying
Do you have knowledge of, eg of New Hampshire (which is mentioned as a counter example in the article?)
https://www.criminon.org/where-we-work/united-states/new-ham...
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-states-use-private-pr...
As long as they're paid fair rates i think it be allowed.
Why aren't we all doing this?
cl0ckt0wer•1h ago
We really need to get rid of the exception in the 13th amendment.
_qua•1h ago
schaefer•1h ago
djohnston•59m ago
faitswulff•59m ago
_qua•43m ago
If you're interested in doing hard federal time, I would suggest you consider interstate trafficking of distribution quantities of drugs.
JumpCrisscross•45m ago
They tend to have strong, albeit local effects.
Friend owns a plumbing parts business in Arizona. They have an ethical stance against using prison labour. The result, however, is that when the prison workers are trained on a production process, he is basically forced to cede that market to his competitors. If that involved specialists, he's forced to lay them off.
SuperShibe•44m ago
lovich•1h ago
It’s just slavery with all the perverse incentives that come with it, and I think we’d all be better off if this was a lever that no one in society had access to pull on
malcolmgreaves•54m ago
What then? If they're not forced to produce something of value to give to you, then how can you ever be made whole again? Does the state pay? If so, why do taxpayers who didn't commit a crime foot the bill? If it's insurance, then why do non-criminals paying insurance premiums foot the bill?
If there's nothing linking the action (_theft_) to the needed outcome (_restitution_), then there's this unmoored loop of perverse incentives wherein some folks can continue to commit crimes with very limited consequences.
Doesn't mean that everyone should be forced to work while in prison. But surely for any and all crimes that have a clearly defined dollar amount, shouldn't that criminal be forced to pay that amount back? Garnishing future wages can be circumvented (_just don't get a real job when you get out, keep stealing things to support yourself_). And even at best, it's very much _delayed_ restitution. Justice delayed is justice denied.
margalabargala•42m ago
To be clear, in the present day, when a prisoner works, how much money do you think they make, and who do you think keeps the value produced?
WaltPurvis•35m ago
ryoshoe•36m ago
Are any of these solutions that unreasonable when you consider that the state/taxpayers are already footing the bill to keep prisoners incarcerated?
p_ing•34m ago
How do they pay you back when employers run background checks (not to mention housing)?
WaltPurvis•40m ago
That's a different problem, for different inmates -- the inmates covered in this story are paid market rates. It mentions the software developer has a six-figure salary.
charcircuit•37m ago
Why would the prison / prisoner charge below market rates for their labor?
toomuchtodo•35m ago
https://www.walkfree.org/news/2025/13th-amendment-loophole-f...
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/13/1210564359/slavery-prison-for...
https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit...